Revisit a Pimple-Laden Past in From up on Poppy Hill

March 13, 2013

“It’s right out of a cheap melodrama,” one character remarks in From up on Poppy Hill, after a particularly extreme twist of fate—yet this film’s gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one’s suspension of disbelief. A film about fathers and children, and the way we use the past as a prism for the present, Poppy Hill is fittingly a collaboration between Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and his son Goro (Tales From Earthsea). Our endearing protagonist is Umi (voiced by Sarah Bolger), a high school student in Yokohama, 1963. With an absent mother and a dead father, Umi has plenty of responsibilities, but adolescence being what it is, she’s dragged into helping her crush, Shun (Anton Yelchin), save a local clubhouse from demolition. If the film was merely a depiction of adolescent longing, its portrayal of that alone would be worth your $12—unconstrained by the limitations of the human face, the animators paint remarkably nuanced states of teenage distress onto their principals. (You may be brought back to your own pimple-laden past.) Yet Poppy Hill also explores Umi’s attempts to identify with a father she barely knew for the sake of her own budding individuality, and Shun’s attachment to the clubhouse out of respect for its past. Some third-act revelations may really test the scales of plausibility, but Poppy Hill ultimately is not about its story as much as the emotional states it probes.